Going Through Them Changes

The self help industry is huge. Thousands of books are published each year that claim they will help you lose weight, make friends, organize clutter, lower debt, etc. Ultimately, most of them are saying that they can help you change your bad habits which are at the root of most personal problems. People keep buying these books but there is little evidence that most of them are really useful in solving the problems that people need help with.

One of the problems is that they do not really take into account how complex the problem of personal change is. Everyone has worked on changing a habit that bothered them. But everyone has experienced failure in projects of self improvement.  The authors of Changing for Good took a more generic approach to personal change. They reviewed a lot of psychological research to find out what it takes to successfully change a habit. What they found was that there are six major stages of habit change. Most self help books only focus on one or two stages and this explains the widespread failure of the systems in these books. If you are not in one of the stages covered in a particular book, then the book will not help you change.

The first stage of change is to decide if things are fine or if you need to change something. This requires self examination and checking with people you are close to for signs of problems, discontent, stress, etc. in your life.

If there is a problem, then the next stage is to identify exactly what the problem is. Sometimes the surface problem is more of a symptom than a cause. You have to dig to find out what the source of your problem is. This may take some time as you think, research, talk to people, etc.

Once the source of the problem has been identified, then you have to come up with a plan that will help you solve it. This is where some self help books may actually be of assistance. Most of them emphasize taking actions to solve problems. The more specific you can be about what actions you need to take, the better.

When you have decided on a plan, the next stage is to actually implement it. You have to make a serious commitment to start specific actions on a specific date. You can either use a particular time each day to do something or use a specific situation to trigger a specific response.

The longest journey begins with one step but you have to keep walking to get anywhere. It is easy to start personal change projects but hard to stick with them. Telling other people what you intend to do can help you stay on the path.

And, finally, you may need to bring the project to a resolution. While some changes will result in permanent new habits, other projects will have a definite stopping point when you have achieved success.

This is an excellent book on personal change. They offer concrete useful suggestions for each of the stages of change. Their studies involving such change projects as stopping smoking show that their system works much better than any other system available. If you have a habit you want to change, this book will help.